GIGABYTE Launches UD PRO SSD Series For Budget-oriented Consumers

A new entrant has just arrived in the SSD market: GIGABYTE. With its initial UD PRO series, the company is targeting the value-conscious consumer who doesn’t want to spend a whole lot, but still want much better performance than mechanical storage (or simply need to replace their preexisting SSD).

GIGABYTE has provided quite a bit of information about its new lineup, which utilizes Toshiba’s BiCS3 3D TLC NAND (that’s a lot of capital letters), which is backed by a Phison controller. Each drive includes DDR3L for the sake of caching, with 256MB available on the 256GB drive, and 512MB on the… (you guessed it) 512GB drive.

Both drives share the same throughput performance of 530MB/s read and 500MB/s write, though the bigger drive scores higher IOPS: 80K vs. 70K for read, and 75K vs. 40K for the write. GIGABYTE says that the 256GB drive will endure 100TB written, while the 512GB’s rating is naturally doubled. We’ve even been given wattage information: 2.6W while writing to the 512GB model, and 2.4W for the 256GB one. If only all of our hardware sipped so little power.

GIGABYTE offers SRPs of $68.99 for the 256GB drive, and $119.99 for the 512GB. This puts it about on par with other value-oriented options, though not all of those will have fast DDR cache under their hood.

In addition to this launch, GIGABYTE has teased that even more goodness will be revealed at next month’s Computex event, and based on other wording, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to see some M.2 SSDs make an appearance there.